Marc Nash's Blog, page 40

Crowd Sauced - Friday Flash

He never did!/ I’d heard that about him before/ Yeah there were rumours aplenty doing the rounds/ Never any smoke without fire/ I’m not surprised to look at him/ You can never just tell by looking at someone can you?/ I was a bit unsure about all those stories but I guess they turned out to be true/ Guilty as sin he is and no mistake!/ Written all over his face he couldn’t hide it/ Course he kept himself to himself now we know why/ What must his parents think?/ Has he no shame?/ Clearly not/ How disgusting!/ Pig!/ It’s obscene that’s what it is, obscene/ I’m amazed he managed to keep it under wraps all this time/ Someone must have known/ What were his neighbours doing for goodness sakes, to not even notice?/ Never mind his neighbours, what about the authorities?/ Well he’s been nabbed now/ Yes thank God/ Caught in the act I heard/ No shock there/ Couldn’t stop himself so it was just a matter of time/ Done well to get away with it this long/ Well he’ll get his comeuppance now/ He’ll probably only get a slap on the wrist/ We can’t let that happen/ Have to send a strong message/ The strongest possible message I’d say/ We simply won’t tolerate it/ No place for the likes of him in our community/ He’s still holed up there inside/ Let’s go drag him out, explain a few things to him/ Make him see the error of his ways/ Rub his nose in his own filth/ Make him confront what he’s done and take responsibility for it/ This type only understands one language/ Make the degenerate pay for what he did/ Then Justice will be seen to be done/ Justice always prevails/ Get what’s coming to him/ There’s no escape/ Yeah the recycling bin’s there for a reason/ Everyone benefits by it in the end

Strings Attached - Rock'n'Roll With Strings

10 great pop and rock tunes, guitars and string sections in perfect harmony (sort of).

Enjoy!

1) The Ramones - "Baby I Love You"
Kings the warp speed guitar punk slow it right down and get in a string orchestra to beef up the hollowness that would pertain otherwise.



2) Portishead - "Glory Box"
this one actually makes sense since Portishead's music was always suggestive of soundtracks for as yet unwritten movies and this works perfectly.



3) Rolling Stones - "As Tears Goes By"
The Stones had a few songs with lush classical accompaniment. I think it was more acceptable in the 60s when rock and roll was still trying to throw off the shackles of the establishment such as the BBC, when every entertainment programme seemed to employ a backing orchestra. Well it's all just music right?



4) Einsturzende Neubauten" - "Armenia"
I'm not sure if this counts because I don't think they ever played with an orchestra but simply took the tape of an Armenian folk song and um did their deconstructionist musical thing over the top of it. But this is my blog, my chart, my rules and they're one of my all time favourite bands!



5) Goldfrapp - "Clowns"
There's no doubt that a string section add textured lushness to what would otherwise be a very brittle song indeed.



6) Led Zeppelin - "Kashmir"
Bloated bombastic rock epic saved by classical strings. Actually that's not quite fair since the Arab tonal textures make it interesting enough.



7) Aerosmith - "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing"
See this is the problem with adding orchestras to hard rock bands, they believe it makes them all serious and respectable. Whatever happened to those who were enjoined to "Walk This Way?". In this song they're invited to sit down and take the weight off...



8) Massive Attack - "Unfinished Sympathy"
While heavy metal and punk bands glom on some strings either to lend credibility that they are making 'classic' music, or in an ironic fashion, Trip-Hop bands like Massive & Portishead who were mixing and weaving together different types of sounds in their tonal landscapes which meant that the strings sounded more organic and embedded into the ensemble. As in here. Boring video though.



9) The Verve - "The Drugs Don't Work"
The Verve's two biggest hits, this and "Bittersweet Symphony" both employed string sections. I can't even name any of their other songs, don't know if that says anything?



10) REM - "Everybody Hurts"
Lush, lush, lush and now not a description of Peter Buck allegedly in a plane...



Bonus Track - Lou Reed "Perfect Day
Perfect symbiosis, nothing more needs to be said. RIP Lou

Bedroom Ballistics

She whipped out the automatic and pressed its muzzle into his belly. In her fury she envisioned his flabby gut enveloping the gun and absorbing it into its mass. Her professional override clicked in and offered V²/(2xS) instead. The bullet’s kiss off would likely be smothered not by his bulk, but by his proximity. The projectile would not possess enough time to accelerate from the subsonic to supersonic velocity in order to wreak its trauma. Limited acceleration, limited damage according to F=MxV². Fortunately his reflexive backing away helped unblock that particular stricture. Recoil ushers in recoil, as her countenance shot him a rictus smile with the unassailable truth of KE (Kinetic Energy) = ½mv² 
His palms were splayed out in front of him in the timeworn gesture of soothing. Dampening down. Importuning her to take it easy. With the triangulation of her, him and the gun, she plotted whether the upraised palms were protecting some vital part of his body. Not that it would matter, she could shoot him through the hand and it will still likely carry on to penetrate his vitals. VRt = VR Cos r.
His hands would only serve as crosshairs for her as he continued his backing away. Zeroing her in on his nether regions. Or never seen regions in the fat lump. Again he was unwittingly doing her a favour. She pictured the projectile scything through his imploring fingers. Those duplicitous fingers that had plied and kneaded the flesh of another woman. The fingers had strayed, could the flesh and bone now deflect the unerring reproach of her snub-nosed love letter? Did he imagine himself to be some sort of super-hero? He was about as far removed from one as you could get. As witnessed by his unheroic continued retreating. 
That was the thing about living a double life. You were still only possessed of a single body. Quantum mechanics EΨ ≠ HΨ be damned. Well might he continue to paw at me at night, but she could tell that it was desultory. Cursory. That his appetites had already been sated elsewhere and there was no real hunger behind the dead pressure on her breast or neck. She could see through his charade. And soon after the bullets do as bullets do, she would be able to see through his body too.
He was still backing away. She wondered how far he’d have to retreat before he was out of range. From the gun if not her yet more searing wrath. Actually it was no wonder at all. Simple precession equation, with little in the way of temperature or atmospheric pressure fluctuation to account for. Ergo R = vo√(2h/g). Course their house wasn’t large enough for him to escape the range of the bullet. Even though he’d almost reached the stairs now. 
She opted to close the gap once again and started advancing upon him. Normally he could easily outstride her as when they walked together out in the street, how that should have been a warning as to how much of a mismatch they were. But here he was walking backwards, plus going down the stairs, while some of his momentum was also diverted into the downward thrust of his hands still gesturing her like a lion tamer ∫ = Fdt.
She caught up to him double quick and this time she pushed the barrel of the gun into his cheek. She marvelled at the displacement of flesh as the barrel bevelled into his skin according to σ = C:ε. Was this how her flesh rucked and ridged under his leaden touch? When he customarily pinched her lips shut. Actually no, she surmised more applicable might be R: = ∇ x F  = 0. Mind you if she kept increasing the pressure of the barrel against his flesh, it becomes R: = ∇ x (∇ x ε). Infinitesimal strain theory, never was something so aptly named. 
*
“There, that sufficiently spice things up for you?”“Yeah, yeah it did Babe. In parts”.“Parts?”“Yeah, there were stages where I could tell you were really feeling it. Etched right across your fizzog, so that you had me believe you might even go ahead and pull the damn trigger... But then, there were also those points where that pretty brow of yours pursed and furrowed and I could see how you were struggling to disengage that planet sized brain of yours from dragging you out of the moment by overthinking it-”

FD = ½ρv² CDA

Many thanks to Kevlin Henney who made sure I got at least the very first equation right. Apologies to any serious physicists who spot errors in subsequent formulas.

Music Genre versus Literary Genre

In my non-writing professional life, I worked for almost 20 years in the music industry. You work there for longer than 10 years and you start to see the same musical trends coming back round for a second or third time. For rock/pop is a relatively young art form, only really being in existence since the 1950s (and the rise of the teenager with spending power).

We started with rock and roll, which in the 1960s morphed into psychedelia and the first rumble of heavy metal. In the 70s we had Prog and Glam rock which in turn prompted the oppositional punk rock which soon burned out and mutated into New Wave. Reggae too established itself as a music of protest in the UK and the Caribbean. There was also funk which gradually led to disco at the end of the decade and hip-hop and rap in the next decade. In the 80s there was also the synthesiser led New Romanticism. The 90s saw the explosion of dance music, in too many categories to comprehensively list, but let's offer Trance, House, Acid House, Rave, Ambient etc etc. Rock tried to strike back with Grunge in the US and Brit Pop by appointment to HM Government in the UK.

I've missed out a few along the way, but these are broadly the different genres in the short span of rock. But then somehow not only were some of these genres revisited (as against reinvented) such as Nu-Rave or New Wave of The New Wave, but the above genres fragmented into a myriad of sub-genres. Hip-hop and rap had several offshoots when combined with some dance music trends, so we had Jungle, Grime, Drum & Bass, Dub Step, R&B. No longer did we have good old Heavy metal, but Nu-Metal, Speed Metal, Death Metal, Rap Metal, Grindcore, Industrial Metal, Thrash Metal, Christian Metal and so it goes on.

Such fracturing makes for tribalism among fans as they rigorously defend their corners and practise exclusionism of those close cousins who somehow minutely differ in definition. For such a relatively young art form, the whole form seems moribund having repeatedly cut the cake of musical possibility finer and finer until only the crumbs remain. Yes the revolution of the industry through downloads and digital access and the machinations of the likes of Simon Cowell's TV-tie in music production have delivered crushing blows to musical creativity. But I believe it is this fracturing into sub-genres of music that have stifled the potential and possibilities of musical creativity.

It is of course possible that there are no new combinations of sounds and notes that have not already been committed to recording. But the opposite is true of the novel. Though an art form a good couple of centuries older and with a much larger back catalogue to call upon, the novel has barely begun to explore its own possibilities. There was a brief flourishing under literary modernism which took narrative and language in different directions, but that soon faded out for whatever reasons (of which I will not accept that it was an artistic and intellectual dead end).

So the novel stands replete with possibility and bristling with potentia. There are whole new bodies of knowledge opened up that allow us to interrogate mankind & the world around us with different images, paradigms and languages should we authors wish to explore them. Theories of mind, of matter and the universe to name but three. However, if the novel allows itself to continually fragment and divide itself down lines of genre and sub-genre as music has done, then it stands little chance of being big and bold enough to rise to these challenges and possibilities. Instead, as with music, it will channel itself down furrows and reduced horizons, fighting petty and insignificant battles over territory and definition. Who cares that what we once called scifi has now fractured into Space Opera, Hard Scifi, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Apocalyptic/dystopian, Slipstream, SciFi-Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, New Weird. Just give me the radical ideas and linguistic inquiry of "Solaris", "Embassytown" or "The Embedding". Ambition is always shrunken by genre, perhaps because of the proscription of the rules behind genre definitions, perhaps because of the expectations of the readership demanding more of the same.

It's all just fiction right? It's all about the novel (unless it's about short stories of course). And the novel remains fertile ground ripe for exploration. Please let's avoid the mistakes of the music industry. While the production and distribution upheavals in the digital age are similar within both music and literature, there's no reason for the practitioners, for the authors to make the same mistakes of their music peers and succumb to a rigid and limiting prescription of labels. We have a much longer and possibly grander tradition to uphold. And we can only do that by striking out into fresh pastures, not regurgitating what has come before and trying to make out by some quodlibet of definition that it is truly different. The New Wave of The New wave indeed...


If you don't believe me about the tribalism of music genres, then check out the comments to this YouTube video. The Nu Rave band Klaxons dared to cover an Old Skool dance track called "The Bouncer" and thus was battle enjoined...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=927ILV0GxdE

The Word To Come - Friday Flash

She came round lying in the recovery position. Her mouth was dry and gritty, while her leaden tongue felt like a lump of rock. She wasn’t in her bed however, as her hand groped sightlessly under her. To judge by the impression reported by her fingers, she appeared to be prone on a ceramic floor. She granted herself five more minutes rest and turned on to her back. Something careened in her mouth, as she experienced the hard smack of an object against her teeth. Yet no pain signals lit up the nerves. Come to think of it, her roster of aches and pains that was habitually ushered in with the dawn, was also absent. 
She pincered two fingers together and delved into her mouth, as she finally batted open an eye. Instead of the expected fleshy grub of her tongue, her digits encountered something smooth and unyielding. She withdrew it carefully and inspected the mineral interloper. It was a red gemstone, garnet in all likelihood, cut into the shape of a heart, but not one she recalled from her personal trove. She was well acquainted with garnet, since it represented her birthstone. 
She sat upright and tried to take in her surroundings. There didn’t seem to be a door set into any of the walls. Looking down she saw that the floor was composed of tessellated tiles, each which had a letter of the alphabet inlaid into it, cast in differing precious stones. She rose up on to her bare feet. She was nervous about treading on the stones in case they had rough edges that might tear into the flesh of her soles. So she sank once again to her haunches and gingerly brushed her hand over the gems of the letter ‘E’. They seemed flush enough. 
She scuffed her way to the perimeter and proceeded to trace a circuit around the entire room, her hand breasting the walls searching for a depression or anything that might suggest a portal. There wasn’t one to be found, but she did note that the dully twinkling stones in the floor letters didn’t contain garnet. She deduced that she already held the key in her hand. Now to find the lock.
The letters must be telling her something. She studied them and discerned just twenty-six, one for each letter, with four blank tiles in the corners. Blanks weren’t worth points in Scrabble she ruefully recalled. The letters did not seem to be arranged in alphabetical order, nor as on a Qwerty keyboard. Stood in the middle to where she had returned, were an ‘E’, ‘A’, ‘S” and ‘T’. Craning her neck she saw that ‘J’, ‘Q’, ‘Z’ and ‘X’ abutted the blank tiles. Clearly they were arrayed according to frequency and that meant that she was probably expected to transcribe messages by walking on them to spell out words.
She traversed the word ‘Help’, except that in order to move from the ‘H’ through to the ‘P’ involved divagations through extraneous characters, so that she actually spelled out ‘Hearldvp’. Nothing doing. Then it struck her, she might employ the garnet like a marker in the game of Hopscotch. She gently lobbed it towards the ‘H’ but it bounced and settled on the neighbouring ‘Y’. While she was berating herself for lifelong inability at anything sporty, the gems fabricating the shape of the ‘Y’ lit up. That must be it then, how to eliminate  the effect of walking on intermediary letters. The letters she deliberately lit up would solely be the ones spelling out the words. Now all she had to ensure was the surety of her aim in targeting her chosen characters. Throwing involved too much uncontrollable caroming. She would have to slide the gemstone along like a shuffleboard if she wanted to escape her prison.
She transcribed a path to spell out the plea ‘Let me live’, but immediately wanted to edit it to ‘let me out’. She wondered how she could delete things. Perhaps the blanks held the key, that they represented an erase function. But why were they perched in the corners and the least accessible? An encouragement to getting it right first time she supposed. She decided to try and merely reverse the order of the word to be struck out, even though in this case she was transcribing the word ‘evil’. It seemed to work, as instead of the gems remaining illuminated, they were extinguished. She completed her plaintive ‘let me out’ but the room did not shift its architecture to accede to her request. 
She then re-rendered the message, this time using the blank tiles as spacers between the three words. It still yielded no ‘Open sesame’, even after she spelled out that very injunction. She sat back down forlornly to consider her options. She had been moving along a life-sized Ouija Board. The very thought sent a shiver down her spine. Yet she wasn’t cold, despite bare feet on cold-fired clay. Nor was she hungry or thirsty, or in need of relieving herself. She felt none of the physical sensations of a ravaged body. Including not one of her customary pains. Was she dead? Had she passed over into this atrium in limbo? Was the garnet, her personal birthstone, there to endow her rebirth? Presumably as this was March, or at least it was the last time she was aware, she would be reborn with a new birthstone to mark it.

Then the question became what she was supposed to write on this floor keypad. Was she supposed to petition for her life, one letter at a time? By doing what, begging for a new one, or accounting for her old one so that it merited a second spin of the wheel? It would take an eternity to account her whole past life just ended. Ended, but not concluded she reminded herself. Or maybe this was Eternity itself, an endless retelling of her story? To stave off the final surcease of extinction, she had to keep talking, or in this case spelling. She had to sustain the inlaid floor gems spangling like a low-rent disco Scheherazade. She slid the garnet over to the letter ‘I’...

Nu Skin - flash story

The amino acid readers had levelled the playing field for love. You saw someone you fancied in the arms of another man. At a glance you can see you do not match up to her physical type. So you merely whip out your reader and scan the paramour’s DNA. His reaction would inevitably be conflicted. Flattered that you recognised him as a superior looking man worthy of emulation. Moderately perturbed that you were about to challenge him. The reader’s particle field serving as a gauntlet being slapped across the love rival’s cheek. For, after a single night having your DNA reconfigured under the auspices of the machine, the next morning there you were a perfect physical replica of the beau. Then it was solely down to charisma and personality to swing the women’s choice between her two identical specimens.  

Yet it wasn’t quite so simple. The body might have changed overnight, but the psyche had to permit itself time to get used to it. In the same way that first time you shaved your new face and its unfamiliarity would trip you up time and again and lead you to slice your visage to ribbons, you also had to project your new features appropriately. You could not carry yourself the same way as you had with your former body. You had to ease into your gait, figure out the space it inhabited, how it moved and gestured. Too precipitant and you would sink any chance you had with your object of desire, since your mismatched clumsiness with your own self would paint you as inherently undesirable. For all the instant  transformation, the shrewd suitor still had to play the long game of love.

The Word Alchemist - Friday Flash

He honed his art by practising on an orange. He mastered inserting the scalpel without any projection of juice. Next he learned to incise the webbing from the fruit itself, furnishing a pure citrus without a single pith strand adorning it. Having licked the challenge of the orange, he stepped up his programme by turning his scalpel to slabs of meat. He removed the vestiges of cartilage and ligament that the butchers hadn’t been able to purge. Then he shivered the meat in the leanest of lean cuts, until finally he shaved the meat so fine, he was able to isolate individual cells which he confirmed by mounting them on slides and viewing them under his microscope. He pronounced himself ready.
He took a novel from the Victorian canon. He opened it up at random and set about the page with his scalpel. He worked sedulously to life the words from the page at the tip of his blade. He was the inverse of an ancient scribe filling in the gilt of an illustrated leaf. (Something later in his endeavours he would also render, on a stolen manuscript from a monastery’s private collection he had paid an arm and a leg and a kidney to secure). Eventually he had separated a whole paragraph of words and held them in the palm of his hand. They just lay there inert. He parcelled his fingers over them and brought them up to his ear. They declined to speak to him. They conjured up no divination of their cached lore.
He turned his attention to bisecting flash cards with much the same mute outcome. They imparted no volume. He also applied a pencil over some Gothic letter transfers, experimenting with deliberately not shading a corner here or there, but watching fascinated as he lifted the transfer sheet and saw the heft of the rest of the letter pull and suck the unpressured corner to complete the whole character. He brought his scalpel to the transfer sheet and whittled away the backing film to liberate the sticky letters themselves. Yet still they greedily hung on to their distilled literacy no matter in what order he arranged them. 
After gutting volume after volume, tome after tome, he came to the conclusion that the problem was he was dealing with hollowed words. Words that had been applied to their receptive material planes through industrial processes. Of inks and laser print, die cast stamps and polymer tape impressions. These were all far removed from preserving any runic power the alphabet possessed. No wonder the words lay dead on a page like the tombstones of mass graves.
And so he returned to the surfaces from which they had been severed. He examined the pages and the folios. Some still bore faint traces where their letters had lain (especially the illustrated manuscript which still had some flakes of gold ingrained in the mutilated vellum). But they were far from excitation trails or ghostly spoors and yielded him nothing further than the limp letters that had lain in his hand. The surface itself contributed nothing transformative to spark life into the letters once they came into contact with it. He ingested a few of the blank pages but felt nothing. Their contents was not restored to his consciousness in any way at all.
He took some sheets that he had scraped clean of words and ground them up with mortar and pestle. He placed the shards into a retort and added some aqua vitae to dissolve them, stirring furiously, before applying a gentle heat. When the solution was clear, he drew it up into a syringe and injected himself. Still there was no transmutation, no words informing him having been resurrected from their ghostly impressions on the treated paper. This was true even of the ancient papyrus he had liberated from a museum of antiquities in the name of his “academic research”. The parchment was sufficiently archaic as to make him severely ill once it had entered his bloodstream.
He remained undeterred however and when finally able to rise again from his sickbed, he pondered further on the conundrum. The letters themselves possessed no incantatory power, nor the surface on which they were housed. And yet together they engendered a magical creative transfer of energy.  Therefore the secret had to lie through their amalgam. He wrote his own words out on some chromatography paper. He wrote the word ‘orange’ in orange ink, ‘black’ and ‘jet’ in black ink, and ‘red’, ‘read’ and ‘rubicund’ in red ink on the paper. Then he added ‘green’, ‘greengage’ and green gauge’ all in green ink and as a control test he wrote ‘yellow gauge’ in green ink too. Then he placed the paper funnels in their solvent containers and sweated them in the vapours. When the process was finished, all that stained the paper were smears of colour separated out into their inky dye constituents. The words were completely lost.

Language was not prepared to yield up its profound essences. The letters embodied no inherent sounds to enflesh them to a reader or auditor. They lay limp and voiceless. The pages may have rustled when he turned them. They even vibrated when he respired through the holes his scalpel had forged, but that was not really equatable to how one read. He could only conclude that this had been an inquiry doomed from the outset. That language was far too tainted and corrupt to ever attain a perfect, eternal form. There was nothing ennobling to be derived from it. 

National Anthems - Songs About Countries

10 songs with countries in the titles. Let's get these adopted as the national anthems of these countries!

1) Armenia - Einsturzende Neubauten
Based on an Armenian folk tune, the metal deconstructionists do what they always do and cast their ineffable stamp over it so that it's not anything you or I would recognise as a folk song! But at its heart it retains its soulful wail.



2) America The Beautiful - DOA
Canadians have a chip on their shoulder about their neighbours to the south don't they? Still, they have a point here perhaps...



3) Castles In Spain - The Armoury Show
When Magazine broke up they formed an even more arty group called The Armoury Show with half of the members from the band Skids. This was perhaps their most famous song as they didn't last terribly long.



4) Sweden - The Stranglers
This video is baffling, unless you realise that mysterious drummer Jet Black who never spoke in the band, was from Sweden, so when they go "all quiet on the Eastern front" while laying a head on patient Black's midriff, that might just explain what's going on. But that's probably no help at all is it?



5) Lebanon - The Human League
So the band that sung about suits pursued in cocktail bars and exclaimed how they only played synths because they couldn't master guitars here suddenly go all serious minded  and resort to guitar strings too. *Shakes head*



6) Israel - Siouxie and The Banshees
Yes that is Robert smith of The Cure playing guitar in the video. He helped the band out for a while, so you had the King and Queen of Brit Goth Pop temporarily in the same band. No idea what this somg is on about mind...



7) Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedys
If I could get serious for a moment here, this song did more than anything to prompt me to keep aware of the situation in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, an interest I've maintained undimmed over the last 30 years. And it's actually a song to beat trendy liberals with rather than the situation in Cambodia at the time back in 1977.



8) Haiti - Arcade Fire
I have one album by arty band Arcade Fire, most of the tracks on it are called "Neighborhood", though this track is on it too. Note, when you have that many musicians in an indie band, it is impossible to make any money. Just sayin'



9) Vietnam - Jimmy Cliff
Something slightly incongruous about this jaunty reggae beat backdropping a song about the Vietnam War and a mother being informed of her son's death.



10) India - Psychedelic Furs
I never quite got the Psychedelic Furs, though I did like "Pretty in Pink"

Nappy Rash - Friday Flash

They say every body has at least one book inside them.
Or maybe I just read that somewhere. Not in a book mind, more likely in my baby daughter’s entrails, or rather what issues from them. I snappily browse the latest output from her digestive tract and pronounce myself satisfied with this particular edition; as well as being reapprised with what I had for dinner, now since plagiarised and offered back as part of her own developing opus.     
Unfunnily enough, none of the literature on parenting delves much into the subject of the chromatics of your offspring’s off-loadings. Whether, their off colouring, denotes that she may be off key. The topic crops out barely a pothole, in what is otherwise a mountain of exalted agglomerations of evolutionary know-how. A repository teeming with the species’ collected works on rearing. A clearing house of formative sagacity. With its ante-room periodicals and primers of anticipation; its delivery suite of digests and catalogued consultation; its study of referenced providence. All in all, an abundant library to lend us the abstruse familiarity of our foundlings. But as you pile-drive through the textbooks, the guidebooks, the TV-advertised partworks with free-ring binder, the cribs, monographs and how-to handbooks, clambering towards the pinnacle of human apprehension, the view emerges of the speciousness of this species wisdom. For, despite all the incunabula, you are simply left holding the baby, probably at half-arm length out in front of you, much like you might hold a book. 
So much for the manual. There isn’t a solitary one worthy of the misnomer, throughout the entire damn voluminous paper trail. Me, I’m shivering up to my elbows in droppings back in the pothole. A single little kick amidst the full-of-the-joys-of-being-alive salvo, and my daughter’s nappy pregnant with discharge has slithered across the changing mat and positioned itself perfectly, to catch the down thrust of my elbow as I swipe her legs up in the air to dab at her bottom. Baby shit on my fingers, baby shit on my ulna. Forewarned is not forearmed. 

Once we’ve unerringly pulped all the trees, which might you consider be worse; to have toilet paper but sacrifice books; or to retain the publication of books at the cost of wiping your arse without any intercessional medium? That’s assuming the whole world hasn’t infarcted and collapsed in on itself, under the weight of impermeable, non-degradable, disposable nappies plugging all our landfill refuse sites.

Penmanship - Flash Fiction

The man was lying asleep on his side, his hand tucked under his face for a pillow, when he was shaken awake. His whole bed was aquiver and he suffered that shooting vertigo as the block mattress was shot up vertically. The tethers bound him in place. He knew what was to follow.
 
The metal probe projected horizontally towards him. Its point was dulled so that there was no spangle reflection to blind his eyes. To help veil him from its unerring assignment. The stylus started cutting into his skin. His wounded flesh responded by filling in the cavities with blood, but the duct mounted beneath the stylus squirted some sort of anti-coagulant to sluice the blood away as soon as it tried to dock with the skin.
 
He shut his eyes and gave into to the lapping swish of the chemical reagent jets. He had endured the sensation so many times, his nerves had ceased to fire at the trespass of the spike. It was gouging out characters on his skin, some of which he could flick his eyes to read, others which remained beyond his purview. Because of the irregular contours of his body, the words spelt thereon were not arranged in sentences. He was not a flat plane like the leaves of a book. And that seemed to be the very object.
 
When the stylus had finished its calligraphic furrows, there was the customary pop as the liquid stream was shut off and replaced by a more viscous fluid. Here it comes, as a black ink was sprayed into the scores in his skin, until the trenches were full to the top. The probe performed its shuffling retreat as it was winched back. He leaned his head back against the metal block and turned to one side. He saw the arrayed ranks of others trussed and coloured exactly the same as him, though he could not make out the inscriptions on their flesh. A printing block army. A typeset textual host. And then it began.
 
In rapid fire, the typebars were launched forward headlong, pressing the composed human monotypes against a giant white canvas of indeterminate fabrication. The letters were intaglioed, incised against the blockish lumps of uninscribed flesh to create the impression of three-dimensional lettering. Not unlike that of graffiti taggers, though this was intended as far more of a formal imprint. For this was the justice system’s record-keeping of its proceedings, or at least the footnote annotations thereof. For this race it was important to have the sentences produced with differing depths and alignments and not just necessarily legible in a linear fashion. Their justice resonated with greater and more intricate profundity in that way.
 
The impact at rapid velocity against the canvas always knocked the human print stamps immediately spark out. They came to when a sprinkle of water washed over their face. An alert that the cleansing and maintenance procedures were upon them. Now their blocks were positioned to the horizontal and they passed through a vertical plane of some muslin like material ingrained with an astringent that served to flush out any vestiges of ink squatting in skin recesses. A blast of heat was quickly applied to evaporate any surface liquid and scour the flesh prior to silky spurts of an aqueous polymer coated the degraded flesh and quickly flowed to seal it smooth. The fusible skin would harden and set within an hour and the human composite stick would be good to go once again the following day to record the judgements handed down.